1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vein registration apparatus and a template registration method.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the progress in information communication technology, various services such as electronic money and commuter pass are now available on a portable terminal such as a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and on a portable device such as a portable telephone. Various authentication methods can be used in order to ensure security in the use of these services.
Examples of these authentication methods include a vein authentication technique for authenticating an individual using a vein pattern obtained by imaging a portion of a living body. This vein authentication is expected as a next-generation biometric individual authentication because of its high accuracy in determination and its high resistance to counterfeit and spoofing.
In the biometric individual authentication, however, the same information is not necessarily input every time an authentication is performed, because a state of a living body and an environment at the time of the authentication may vary. Therefore, inputs within a certain distributional range should be assumed based on statistics, which makes it difficult to stably perform the authentication processing with standardized template information.
In view of the above circumstances, in the finger vein authentication, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-213427 discloses a method for stably performing an authentication by storing as templates multiple patterns, which are obtained by slightly rotating a finger is on its axis, i.e., in the longitudinal direction of the finger.